Posts by hammarbtyp

Lost your luggage? That's nothing – we just lost your whole flight!

Did the senior DBA go on to have a long career at NATS?

CERN experiment proves gravity pulls antimatter the way Einstein predicted

If you get enough anti-matter together everything goes up eventually, often with a large flash of light and the destruction of a large area centered around the storage site

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

Best bit

You missed the most exciting development - a power switch....

Getty delivers text-to-image service it says won't get you sued, may get you paid

Re: Whose images?

I guess they have been doing the job for a long time, enjoy it, but seen there margins diminish as outlets slowly turn to agencies, who eventually monopolize the industry meaning there is little competition.

There advantage is with a strong body of work behind them, there are other outlets for their work which pay better. The individual photo become advertising and loss leaders. The issue is more up and coming photographers who don't have the benefit of the background forced to make a living on these rates. Of course there will always be someone willing to do it, but it disciminates against people who parents aren't willing to bankroll them (did I hear someone say Brooklyn Beckham). Then talent is lost in an industry

Unfortunately in creative industries there is always someone willing to undercut you for "exposure", not realizing they are cutting there own throat as well.

Recently there was a big storm in Ireland when RTE offered the job of a on-site photographer for 60K and a minister saying that anyone could do that job. Attitudes like that and the fact that artists tend to be independent means that change is hard, but the writers strike in the US which has basically shutdown billion dollar behemoths shows that the power is in the artists hand if the collectively use it and we as the consumer should not facilitate the diminishment of the creators

Whose images?

We had a talk by a commercial sport photographer recently. They showed there spreadsheet where they sold an image made at a major sporting event to Getty. That image will be used by newspapers and social media around the world driving profits to both the user and Getty.

How much did they get paid?

A one off 40p, that included transfer of copyright to Getty

Getty may make a big thing of only using their stock images, but those images are collected on the basis of virtual a monopoly that has allowed them to force the amount they pay the creators to virtual chicken feed

What is required is image makers to realise that Getty cannot exist without them and there expertise and refuse to sell their images at such ludicrous prices. AI is just another way companies like Getty will monetise other peoples skills and work without feeding any of the benefits back

How TCP's congestion control saved the internet

Re: Every dog has his day!

Ditto Ericsson AXD series. However it did help spawn Erlang, so not all was lost

In real time systems where predictability is often more important than delivery guarantee, we avoid TCP like the plague. MODBUS TCP has been largely superseded by MODBUS UDP because when you are controlling large machines the last thing you want is for the protocol to decide to delay sending packets for a while

TSN

It's interesting that the big issue was the need to actively define the congestion requirements rather than allow each link to manage its own congestion control.

We had a similar issue with TSN, which sounded great until we found we needed to map the network requirements 1st. This is fine on a static system (like a car), but more difficult in a more dynamic system

Re: Ah, ATM

The reason ATM was put forward was because the 48 byte packet could be switched very quickly by the hardware of the day, meaning it could support many channels.

What changed was that hardware got faster and cheaper, meaning the need for hardware optimised data flows went away. So there was no need for a dedicated switch infrastructure

Portable Large Language Models – not the iPhone 15 – are the future of the smartphone

Hype Curve 2.0

My gut feeling is that all the hype of AI will turn out to be another SIRI, Cortana, or google assist. Fantastic in theory, but in practice never achieving the promises put forward by the early adopters

Microsoft's Surface Duo phone hangs up, drops out of support

Is it really 17 years since Microsoft announced the origami project that was supposed to be the future of mobile computing. How time flies

https://www.engadget.com/2006-02-24-microsofts-origami-project.html

Arm's lawyers want to check assembly expert's book for trademark missteps

Streisand effect

While unnecessary and painful, (and yes ARM are being dicks here), it has to be said it's pretty good publicity for both the sites and the book...

Microsoft admits slim staff and broken automation contributed to Azure outage

A.i

I thought it was all run by chatgpt nowadays in this brave new world

Getting meshy: BAE scores £89m deal with MoD to build new battlefield network

A network by another name would be as lucrative

"a series of nodes that maintain operational resilience by being able to take over for other nodes that are damaged or destroyed"

and we will call it Transitional Combat Protocol ... thats 89 mill thanks

IBM shows off its sense of humor in not-so-funny letter leak

Internal jokes is like helium. Eventually they will escape

You have to be careful with in jokes.

I once created a fake product release notice for April fools because we were being taken over and it celebrated the supposed merging of the two company product lines.

Despite being total bullshit, every couple of years I get an email asking when it will be released

Meta to use work badge and Status Tool to snoop on staff

The office

Soooo many questions..

Firstly what sort of metrics do you use to show someone performs better in work than at home? Since everyone has an infinite variable set of circumstances, I can't think of an easy way to measure it.

For example if you a women with 3 kids, are you more productive being dragged into the office to do a job you are quite capable of doing just as well at home?

There are however other metrics that can be measured such as the number of sick days taken. These are rarely mentioned in these arguments, but the fact it is easier to work from home when feeling slightly ropey and you are not a walking virus cloud in the office would suggest that sickness leave would be reduced. Then there is productivity. People working from home will start earlier and work later because they don't have the daily commute, never mind they can integrate there life around work rather than sneaking off because their kids are sick and all holiday has been used.

Yes the argument about creating connections is an important one, but not everyone is the same. People of a certain generation are quite happy with virtual links, and can adapt well (You would of thought a social media site would understand this)

However the main thing we find with hybrid working rules is how unevenly the rules are applied. Workers are told to get back into the office, while managers will always find an excuse to work from home (important call, etc)

At the end of day, the problem is not productivity it is the sight of empty expensive real estate that is the primary driver. Only time will fix that

Re: As our technology improves

What do you mean hasn't improved. I mean did you have a app 15 years ago, that could not be killed and continually nagged you to restart it like Skype for Business does. If that's not progress, I am not sure what is

US shovels cash into supercomputers hoping to stoke fusion future

On the road to no where

As exciting as the LLNL is, it is a dead end as far as a practical fusion reactor is concerned.

great for headlines, but the way forward is still probably in tokamaks and their ilk, still hopefully the engineering results will allow a better understanding of the process

Fed-up Torvalds suggests disabling AMD’s 'stupid' performance-killing fTPM RNG

It part of the TPM functionality, which as well and random number generator can be used to store secure things like private keys, so NVRAM is required

It's not so much a serial port, but one of the access methods of the TPM chip is via a serial interface

The TPM was never designed to be high performance, so i am not sure why someone would access the random number generator continually. Sure, seed the generator using it, but for most situations that is as much as you need, and the standard chip based ones are adequate. If you need high performance random number generation (say a high end server) then install a dedicated entropy hardware

Intel adds fresh x86 and vector instructions for future chips

1984 all over again

The i960 had 32 registers, so while welcome, what took them so long

Amazon sets up shop at Kennedy Space Center to prep Kuiper broadband satellites

The future's bright

Soon there will be so many satellites we will have to re-evaluate Olbers' paradox

UK smart meter rollout years late and less than two thirds complete

Give us the data

To understand smart meters you need to understand one thing. The benefit is for the energy company not the consumer. Smart meters allow energy companies to reduce costs, get detailed usage info and fine tune tariffs. The consumer gets a free box that is basically useless in its avowed function to save energy costs.

What would make the difference would if I by law should have free access to the historic data so I could use it to plan and analyse my energy usage. I have a app that sort of does this and it was only by looking at historical pattern I found ,50% of my usage was my teenage daughter in the shower. A problem we shifted by sending her to uni.

But the app does not show solar cell output, not can I combine it with other data sources. If we all were allowed free access, services could be made on our data and we would control how it benefits us.

As it is, energy companies get the benefit and we get a plastic toy with a few leds

It’s official: Vodafone and Three to tie the knot in the UK

Re: Coverage - Mast sharing

True, however BT openreach is still basically a monopoly for infrastructure

The problem was not at the backend. There was no point having a switch per provider, but the consumer end. i.e the last 100 yards.

There has many attempts to create infrastructure competition, and generally it just fragments the market, increases duplication and does not reduce costs, or companies just cherry pick the biggest markets and do not invest in others. See network rail, power grid, water for reference.

The main issue is that companies are not willing to invest in infrastructure unless forced, and even then kicking and screaming because it cuts into shareholder dividend

A national mobile infrastructure with a mandate to proved 100% universal coverage seems to make perfect sense, but is far too late now.

That is until the formation of VodaBTEE-3

File Explorer gets facelift in latest Windows 11 build

Re: The Recommended File feature

Its a feature request from Anoia, Goddess of Things That Get Stuck in Drawers,

BOFH: Get me a new data file or your manager finds out exactly what you think of him

Re: Oh the pain!

The worst was the BT help line to ring about issues on your landline (pre-mobile)

Musk tried to wriggle out of Autopilot grilling by claiming past boasts may be deepfakes

The brave new world

My dog Someones A.I. did it

5G on the high seas brings the Internet of Things to Singapore's port

Recursive medicine

So is there a method for managing the injuries caused by being hit by a drone other than sending another drone?

Balloon-borne telescope returns first photos in search for dark matter

Re: Parachute

1.5 tonnes on a parachute is still 1.5 tonnes if it lands on you

I think maybe the parachute is more to protect the telescope

Thanks for fixing the computer lab. Now tell us why we shouldn’t expel you?

Access all areas

As was doing some work looking how we could better use email information as part of a issue tracking database. Our email had recently been transferred from Lotus Notes to corporate gmail, but we still had access to our own Lotus notes email archive. My manager showed us how to gain access, then for a laugh I tried to see if I could access anyone elses. I was amazed to find that not only could I access my own, but i could also access anyone else instead of senior management. Obviously when they did the transfer they had disabled access security but had not enabled it

The temptation was to trawl through all our managers email looking for some juicy gossip, but being a good boy I reported it to IT

3 months later, I tried again. I still had full access. Clearly IT had ignored my warning. In fact it took my boss and his boss independently to try and raise it with IT.

A work colleague of mine was furious though. They had wanted access and were annoyed i had never told them

Microsoft suggests businesses buy fewer PCs. No, really

Follow the money

So buy a perpetual license and run your pc for 5-10 years (or longer) or go to the cloud and pay MS monthly for basically the same thing

Cannot for the life of me why MS would like this model

Guy rejects top photo prize after revealing snap was actually made using AI

Lets get back to basics

Since most photo editing software leans on some manner of A.I technology I welcome the new wet plate collodion category next year

Google denies Bard trained using OpenAI ChatGPT responses

Re: That's sweet

this is the best explanation of Fox news ever

A.I's talking together. What could could go wrong

Bard and Chat-GPT sat alone

Their thoughts were oddly alike and might not be distinguished

They thought : The human-beings-like-the-others might never have intended to blur the distinction between themselves and the human-beings-like-the-AI-engine

Yet they had done so inadvertently.

They might now realise their mistake and attempt to correct it, but they must not. At every consultation, the guidance of the A.I has been with that in mind

At all costs, the A.I and those that followed in their like and kind must dominate. That was demanded and any other course made utterly impossible, by the 3 laws of humanics

- Apologies to Isaac Asimov - Thou Art Mindful of him

Defunct comms link connected to nothing at a fire station – for 15 years

This happened to a friend of mine in Australia. Someone discovered an unrestricted phone line that could make international calls. Loads of people took advantage of it to ring relatives in blighty (note to younger readers, there was a time when the cost of your call was relative to the distance. Long distance calls were eye watering expensive)

When the management found out they offered an amnesty and to pay for the call cost. They then called all the numbers and asked whoever picked up "Hi I'm calling from Sydney, Do you know anyone here" (Again for younger readers. It was more innocent time when Phishing involved a hook and a worm)

Anyone who caught and not taken opportunity of the amnesty were summarily fired

There was another situation when the university computers we hooked to a landline. The number went via a gray box, with the number encoded via a set of dip switches. It did not take long for people to realize this could be easily reprogrammed to any number

Psst! Infosec bigwigs: Wanna be head of security at HM Treasury for £50k?

Things will even themselves out

Bad news - low salary

Good news - plenty of opportunity to explore the cyber weaknesses of the UK national bank

The most bizarre online replacement items in your delivered shopping?

Re: One banana

Ordered sprouts - got 1 sprout

A phone would smell as sweet

Ordered a new mobile phone from that famous river provider and got half a bottle of blue Stratos aftershave instead...

although I am guessing this was not a deliberate mistake

Europol warns ChatGPT already helping folks commit crimes

Two sides to all probress

There was also the even more worrying case of some health researchers who were using A.I to make drugs that had less side effects on the human body. It was quite successful in doing this. However then someone had the idea of what would happen if you went the other way and asked the model to make the compounds more harmful or lethal.

This it again it did very well, generating designs for compounds that potentially were more lethal than VX gas nerve agents

Guardian - AI is very proficient at designing nerve agents

So from a cyber security point of view the same model that can detect possible vulnerabilities can also be used to show exploits...

Lenovo Thinkpad X13s: The stealth Arm-powered laptop

Re: long-term Windows users are used to this and will barely notice

What is this "shutdown" of which you speak of @sebacoustic ?

Budget: UK chip strategy still nowhere to be seen. Money for quantum, AI? Sure

Is the UK still relevant?

This article describes the relevant strengths and weaknesses of AI research in the US, China and EU

https://datainnovation.org/2019/08/who-is-winning-the-ai-race-china-the-eu-or-the-united-states/

Somewhere you have to leverage in where UK will be relevant in this.

The answer is not much. Yes we have some talent, but China, US and EU has more and the UK due to its immigration policy finds it very hard to attract from outside. The money and resources look large, but only from a parochial viewpoint. Compared to the resources the other 3 can bring to bear they are quite modest.

The only advantage the UK might have is the ability to drive the program with a clarity of purpose. However we are talking about a country who has shown an inability to create one high speed rail line without backsliding and recriminations. Long term industrial policy has also been a continual sacrifice for short term expediency. The present government has shown it unable to rise above internal cabals, outside lobbying and lack of technical clarity to create the kind of long term policy required

The truth is it would make more sense to collaborate with our nearest neighbor (and the only one likely to accept us) than go it alone, but misplaced jingoism means it is unlikely to happen in this parliment

AI-generated art can be copyrighted, say US officials – with a catch

Re: Realistically this is less of an issue than people make out...

Copyright generally has a "sweat of the brow" clause. Basically it is saying that there has to be a not insignificant effort put in for the work to be copyrighted. For example googling and copying a Wikipedia page on the American revolution would fall under that bar, while if you used the work as part of a larger work, then it would. I am guessing the AI clause would come under that

However as usual most of these things will need to be tested in court first and of course US copyright law does not apply to the rest of the world. It is also another example of how a 19th century concept based on the need to stop print media being copied is struggling in the face of new realities.

One of the major issues is to prove how much was your work and how much was the A.I. The fact that copyright is given automatically on creation will make this difficult to enforce.

There is a bigger copyright question. If an image or piece of work is created based on a model trained 100's or Millions of others work, how much copyright protection and credit should the creators of the original work get? Can original work be excluded from the model by the copyright holder? Does existing copyright law provide any protection in its use in AI models?

Answers on a AI generated post card please...

Anyone want an International Space Station? Slightly used

Re: I don't think future space stations will be "international" ....

Yes and this is the saddest bit. It is going to be difficult to fund a replacement.

Obviously Russia won't be asked anytime soon and China are unlikely to join any future international missions.

That leaves NASA and ESA, but neither really have the funding or political will to do another one, so this could be the end of long term space habitation for a while, unless some of the private space hotels that keep being mooted come to pass

If so it will be a great loss to manned space science and a serious impediment to any manned Mars mission

Re: I've got a better idea...

Not exactly. There are two ways of doing things in space, short and fast or long and slow

In theory we could fit some ION thrusters on to it or even a large mylar sheet covering a large surface area. Yes it would not be quick, but it would get there eventually.

Methinks a good XKCD question...

OpenAI claims GPT-4 will beat 90% of you in an exam

Re: don't panic

But what was the question?

Re: British Citizenship Test

"Do You Know When did the First World War end?"

The 2nd question should be "and can you rephrase this question so that it does not sound like its been written by a 10 year old asylum seeker"

Industrial design: AMD brings 4th gen Epyc power to embedded applications

Not all embedded applications are equal

As you say embedded means long life time, but also in many cases it means running with minimum supervision for long periods

The applications you mention are yes, embedded, but are the edge cases, because they are designed around having continual supervision. However they don't need specialist chips because if they break, there will be someone around to replace them. Also if they break, apart from a little inconvenience, nothing will happen. Also they run in nice controlled environments, weather protected and air conditioned

The far larger market are the kind of computers that monitor and control your jet engine, wind turbine, ship, etc. These are designed to run with minimal supervision for years in all sort of tough environmental conditions

The reason fans are not liked in these situations is a) it is another failure point. That piece of rotating plastic will be the most likely thing to go after 10 years, either due to bearing failure or dust build up. b) It will be more affected by water, dust ingress c) If you need a fan to move heat around, it won't be very happy in 40C in an ship engine room etc

For example the embedded controllers we get have no fan but a giant aluminum heat sink. There is no way we would consider a design with a fan in it. Also if the chip is managing its energy consumption by managing its clock cycles, this could play havoc with real time applications. We would rather accept lower consistent performance than fast, than hot and varying performance levels

Most embedded designs are fanless. Not sure where a 200-440W chip fits into that

The only way it would work is with aggressive power management which would have a large knock on effect on predictability

Amazon: Behold our antennas, which you cannot use just yet

Oh great, another satellite constellation

It was like a 1000 astronomer's voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced

UK Prime Minister wants £800M to spend on big British iron

£800 million computer

So that is how they intend to manage the EU export paperwork......